June 12 was a surreal day of monumental tragedy for Bharat, the third biggest aviation market in the world. It began with the ‘Mayday Call’ around 1339 hours from the cockpit of AI India flight 171 enroute from Ahmedabad Airport to the London Gatwick Airport, that within seconds turned into the first ever ‘Hull Event’ pertaining to a Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Within seconds, India witnessed unfolding of a surreal monumental tragedy – the worst accident involving an Indian Aircraft in India as well as the worst disaster on the ground unleashed by the lunchtime horror.

I will return to the tragedy per say in a while — before that I decode ‘Mayday Call’ and ‘Hull Event’.

Mayday, formally adopted as international radio distress call in 1927, was first introduced in the 1920s by Frederick Stanley Mockford, an officer at Croydon Airport in London to replace the Morse code SOS for voice communication. Used in aviation and maritime communication to indicate most serious life-threatening emergency it is a voice call, typically repeated three times – “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday", alerting authorities to a situation where must immediate assistance is needed.

While “Mayday" call is given from the cockpit, the most serious life-threatening emergencies, other signals like “Pan-pan" are used for less urgent situations.

Once a Mayday call is made, ATC is supposed to give top priority to this distress call.

What we know till now is that the Mayday distress call was the last communication from the pilot of the Air India flight 171 at 1339 hours after which all connections between the air traffic control and the cockpit of the plane was lost.

A “Hull Event" in aviation refers to an incident where an aircraft is either destroyed or damaged beyond economic repair. This term is often used interchangeably with “hull loss" and signifies that the cost or feasibility of repairing the aircraft exceeds its value or practicality, leading to its classification as a total loss.

What played out after the “Mayday Call" and further communication loss with the cockpit of flight AI 171, resulted in the first ever “Hull Event" for Boeing 787 Dreamliner ever since its inaugural flight operated by All Nippon Airways (ANA), flying from Tokyo’s Narita International Airport to Hong Kong International Airport commercial operation on October 26, 2011.

What happened between the “Mayday distress call" and “Hull Event" was a plane crash, a monumental disaster that far exceeded in scale to all previous air disasters in the Indian sky involving an Indian carrier. Within seconds of the mayday distress call, after reaching a height of about 650 feet, the plane started sinking, i.e. it started losing height. In less than a minute after the take-off the plane crashed in Medhaninagar, which is two kilometres from the airport.

So catastrophic has been the scale of the latest air disaster at Ahmedabad that it dwarfs all air disasters in the Indian airspace involving an aircraft belonging to Indian airliners.

Why do I say so? Here is my quick analysis.

After independence, there have been 17 air crashes in the Indian airspace, killing altogether 1,758 persons. This includes 12 air crashes involving Indian airliners, with 1,152 deaths and five air crashes involving foreign airliners involving 636 deaths.

Total deaths in the latest Ahmedabad air crash on June 12 at 241 (passengers and crew) and 41 (reported so far on the ground, the number may increase) is a towering 24.31 per cent of all deaths in air crashes related to Indian airliners post-independence.

The dead include:

Quite clearly, this accident is much bigger in scale than the last biggest crash pertaining to an Indian Airliner in India, a Boeing 746 Air India flight to Dubai that made fatal dive in the Arabian Sea killing all 213. Also, considering all accidents related to an Indian airliner outside India and foreign airliners in the Indian air, the Ahmedabad air disaster stands very close to the........

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